theory

The Essay has constituted an important prose form from the sixteenth century until the present and constitutes an intriguing field for interdisciplinary study. Applied to such a heterogeneous range of writings as maxims, aphorisms and proverbs, letters, treatises in philosophy and the sciences, as well as criticism and journalism of different kinds, it has eluded clear definition. Not surprisingly, literary and cultural studies have been reluctant to tackle what appears to be a random array of prose texts straddling the boundaries between literature, philosophy and scientific writing, criticism and journalism.

How do you "see" literature? How do you "write" photography? In recent years, scholars have drawn a connection between the nineteenth-century realist novel and the rise of photography, suggesting that the novel genre is intrinsically photographic. This argument hinges, in part, on realism, or at the very least on reality effects. Nineteenth-century photography was indeed often used to document: to record landscapes, cityscapes, portraits, and crime scenes. Yet it was also from the start a creative technology, a mode of representation open to experimentation and artistic innovation. How does photography intersect with literature when the aims of one or both are not to represent reality?

This panel explores the way authors in Golden Age Spain accounted for textual debts, whether in their own production or in that of others. How do poets trace literary heritage, such as the sonnet or epic forms, or Petrarchan traditions? How do authors view material 'borrowed' or imitated by contemporaries? How do authors figure their own 'borrowings'? Textual forms and modes such as translation, adaptation, the sequel/continuation, and the re-edition are all valuable points of interest, but of equal importance are technical elements such as allusion or style that produce similar forms of textual indebtedness.

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James informs us that the mystical state operates in an ineffable realm and, as such, language remains incapable of accurately narrating or textualizing the mystical experience. And yet, mystical literature has attempted to find expression for what, ostensibly, can be described as an absence, a lack, a debt within the normative structures of communicative and discursive language. If the mystical experience inhabits a landscape beyond the limits and borders of language, how do writers find the words to describe the ineffable? How do form, word-play, negative dialectics and deconstructive tendencies help structure, out of an absence, a mystic analysis or language of unity?

During the medieval and early modern periods, the Bible was a source of worship, instruction, and entertainment. This panel invites papers that address ways the Bible was read, misread, adapted, or performed. A variety of approaches and perspectives are welcomed. Topics might include translation and adaptation, Bible illustration, the commentary tradition, biblical exempla, apocryphal narrative, and drama.

Call for Papers 20th Annual Lesbian Lives Conference 'The Modern Lesbian' 15-16th February 2013 Hosted by University of Brighton LGBT and Queer Life Research Hub in conjunction with Women's Studies Centre, University College Dublin

The theme for the 20th Annual Lesbian Lives Conference is The Modern Lesbian.

September 27th-30th, 2012 The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Visionaries, professionals, and academics from across the sciences, cultural studies, medicine, visual arts, and music are invited to the University of Pennsylvania for the first ever Psychedemia: a conference integrating psychedelic experiences in academia.